The Financial Toy Room SIMulator

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FTRSim is a C++ library for simulating financial
markets, where agents interact exchanging assets and cash. The library
implements the Financial "Toy Room" (FTR), a model developed at LEM laboratory of Scuola
Superiore S.Anna.

Introduction

The Financial Toy-Room (FTR) is a micro-founded
simulation environment for both decentralized and centralized trade in
a financial asset. Some aspects of the representation are
intentionally kept very simple, and in a sense abstract: quite diverse
models may indeed be implemented as particular instantiations of the
general template presented in the following.

Obvious common points of departure are (i) the acknowledgment
of the limitations of models of market dynamics centered upon the
behavior of a mythical representative agent endowed with unbiased
forward-looking expectations, and conversely (ii) the challenge
of nesting the theory into an explicit account of heterogeneous,
interacting agents.

In FTR we emphasize heterogeneity among interacting agents who might
endogenously evolve beliefs, behaviors and mental models,
together with the specific architectural traits of markets, i.e. the
mechanisms on the basis of which interactions among agents occur.

FTR, by allowing different physics of interaction and different
types of behaviours which are legal in a given market
architecture, makes it possible to represent a wide ensemble of market
architectures. When compared to other artificial markets, it
enlarges the scope of analysis in several respects.

First, FTR entails easy experimentation with different types of
agents, both in terms of behavioral and cognitive patterns, and in
terms of learning procedures.

Second, it allows exploration of the properties of different
architectural and institutional traits, especially with respect to the
physics of interactions (e.g. the specific mechanism for
decentralized encounters), and the information availability by
individual traders or groups of them.

Third, FTR allows to represent time in alternative and possibly quite
sophisticated ways.

For a more detailed description of the Financial Toy-Room, please see
the overview section of this web site.

Latest news

Nov. 24 2000: released version 0.2, now it compiles without
generating warnings and all optimizations enabled.

Nov. 6 2000: the first alpha version has been
released!

Getting in touch

FTRSim has been developed according to the Open Source philosophy. You
can freely re-distribute the source code but you cannot use it or part
of it for commercial purposes without out explicit permission. For
further details refer to the LICENSE file in the distribution.

If you would like to contribute to this project, or you want to send a
bug report, please contact me at lipari@sssup.it. In the next future
we will set up a mailing list for this project. Keep in touch!!